I want the world to bring me to my knees
Whether in joy or sorrow I don’t care
So long as one day I learn to surrender.
2.
It rained last night at Gaston Pond again,
So everything that was first a trickleIs now a flood, and on the trail
Even last winter’s wet leaves have turned
An ashy, carbonic gray.
How to cross the floods of life?
The early Buddhist nuns put it this way:
You cross a flood slowly, barefoot,
Feeling for stones.
3.
Each early morning I walked in the woods
With mom’s binoculars, looking for birds.
And each morning I saw and heard many birds,
For it was the time of their spring migration.
Woodpeckers, herons, ducks, hawks, wrens, finches…
I did not know their special names, but I remembered
A posterboard of Sibley’s drawings and identifications
Tacked up in some forgotten basement kitchen or bathroom.
So I began to scour the halls for this board, to learn the birds’ names.
After some days of searching,
It became apparent that this board must have appeared
In one of many vivid dreams I dreamt that week.
And I understood that the object of my longing,
And the search it engendered, existed only in my mind.